With the music industry's embrace of the digital transfer of copyrighted entertainment files at the retail level, downloading of music files has undergone explosive growth and has led to the creation and marketing of specific portable devices dedicated to playing and storing digital music. While previous portable music players such as portable CD and tape players relied on a removable storage media to carry segments of a user's music library, portable devices adapted to play downloaded music are characterized in that the medium on which the entertainment content is digitally stored is exclusively internal, and not regularly removed and interchanged by retail users of the devices.
The first generation of such digital portable devices include, for example, the iPod (available through Apple Computer Corporation of Cupertino, Calif.), the Rio (available in North America through Digital Networks North America of Santa Clara Calif.; elsewhere through D&M Holdings, Inc. of Tokyo, Japan), and the Nomad (available in North America through Creative Labs of Milpitas, Calif.; elsewhere through Creative Technology of Singapore). These first generation portable digital music players are limited in that an intermediary computer is necessary between the portable music player and an originating source of the entertainment content files. Generally, users of these devices would first fix a copy of their desired entertainment media file to an intermediate personal computer, such as by copying media files from an already owned CD or downloading directly from a content provider over the internet. Once the desired content files were copied to the personal computer, the user would then upload the desired tracks from the PC to the portable digital device. More adept users could copy to their portable digital device directly from a CD or an online content provider, but the intermediary computer remained necessary.
To avoid the undesirable result of consumers carrying multiple different portable devices, each being dedicated to a different set of functions (e.g., mobile phone, personal digital assistant, portable gaming device, portable digital music player), manufacturers have been converging certain different functions into integrated devices. However, many traditional portable devices remain in use that do not have such convergent functionality built in. More such traditional devices are currently being put into use for those consumers whose personal cost-benefit analysis weighs against such multi-functional portable devices.
One such traditional device is a mobile phone with internal memory that is insufficient to store many different music media files. For example, a typical popular music song, encoded using the popular MP3 format, occupies about 3-5 Mbytes of memory when stored. Nokia's widely used mobile station model 7650 is listed as having about 4 Mbytes of free user memory (though models 7600 and 7700 versions have 30 and 25 Mbytes internal memory, respectively), and other more basic mobile stations may have even less. The mobile terminal memory capacity can be extended by using memory cards, but not all model support this feature. Thus a single music file can occupy substantially all of the free memory of a mobile station, imposing a hardware barrier that keeps some consumers from experimenting with portable digital music on a traditional mobile phone. What is needed in the art is a way to allow the users of portable devices with limited memory to experience portable digital music on those devices, without the users having to actively manage memory in those devices by deleting ringtones or other files. The inventors have found that their developments in pursuing a solution to the above need can be put to broader uses beyond just limited-memory devices, as detailed below.